"Dog, your training has been approved."
"Citrix? Finally??"
"No, Oracle. DBA path.
"Umm... "

Poll: Preferred database
x-posted to da brog.

Your clocks are running seven hours too fast. PLZFIXKTHXBYE!

I like my Japanese cow-orkers. I really do. Of course, I've never had any "face-time" with them which might explain this lack of animosity. But when I need to work with them I either have to be up at 3am (and sober enough to function) or I might as well send snail mail. One round-trip communication takes three days.

Poll: LOL creashunistas
x-posted to da brog.

People often ask me, "REC? Why do you drink so much? Are you trying to become an alcoholic?"

Become? Hah! Walk a mile in my moccasins, muthafuckers. Or just sit in this room and listen.

I aten't dead yet!
Drinking poll included
x-posted to da brog.

That didn't go over so well.

x-posted to da brog.

I have a German keyboard and I like it a lot (though it'd be better if it was a clicky Type-M "buckling spring" board). I have a Type-M but it's US-American and is missing the key between the left shift and the Y (that's a Z to you QWERTY people). Ever since I first sat in front of a German keyboard all those years ago, I have preferred the layout for everything except when I need curly braces and square brackets. Thankfully I code very little. I've also since added many more characters with the Keyboard Layout Creator.

That key down on the left is a "less-than" in its normal state, a "greater-than" when shifted, and a "pipe" when combined with the AltGr (right-alt). It's great for HTML, but occasionally it's possible to enter the angle bracket in the wrong direction. This isn't usually a problem. Not usually.

Poll: keyboards
x-posted to da brog.

Goddamn I hate when the phone ring. It was Meathead, my new manager after his recent promotion and the latest management shuffle. Having himself spent so much time kill floor he's much more tolerable and understanding of our problems than any of my previous headaches.

"Hey, Dog. I need to see you in my office." Fuck. What did I do now?
"Gimme five to write up this ticket solution and I'll be there."

x-posted to da brog.

In comparison with the cost of our software licensing and support contracts, the cost of a the hardware is negligible, even with the most expensive OS running on it. In fact we could probably give away racks of 2U dual-Xeons with 16GB RAM and dual 300GB hot-swappable SCSI drives in order to push our applications. We could even throw in copies of Windows Enterprise Datacenter edition for those companies too cheap to outsource their operations where competent UNIX/Linux admins can be found.

Over the expected life of the hardware, the cost of the equipment is statistically 0 at a confidence level over 95% as compared to the costs of the software and people to make it work. Few idiots realise this -- not even our own. So perhaps I shouldn't have been as surprised to receive the following question:

x-posted to da brog.

I have to leave this job. I must. I've reached a point I didn't think possible and having seen it, I know this can't go on.

Another high-prio Class 1 ticket came in which wasn't really Class-1 because the system wasn't down.

x-posted to da brog.

It's been a year since I posted a new method for solving sudoku puzzles. Maybe it's just me but the hardest puzzles seem to have gotten a lot harder over the past year or two and some friends have agreed. Over the past six months I've come up with another method to retaliate: the "Group Cut". Being able to solve the hardest sudoku inside 10 minutes, I decided to make things more difficult and stopped writing helper numbers in unknown squares. That led to my discovery of this method which I use on around a quarter of all sudokus I solve these days.

Includes 29 graphics totaling 211KB

x-posted to da brog.

I'm in the wrong business.

In order to ingratiate myself to management and colleagues alike, right after our local data center was moved to the UK for "consolidation" I built a local file server. This held various software builds available via resumable FTP. Since Windows Exploder has never been able to move 12GB of data across even a 10 fibre channel connection, this pleased everyone.

Sunny weather poll
x-posted to da brog.